Eighteen years ago I published Magic City. It got some great reviews like the one below.
*Starred Review* Give Thorn credit. He’s trying–trying to make accommodations with the modern world, anything to demonstrate to crime-scene photographer Alexandra Rafferty that he is committed to their relationship. Hence his radical decision to stay with Alex’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted father in Miami while she attends a seminar. But the “ragged, hustling pulse of Miami” does crazy things to Key Largo recluse Thorn, making his “hypersensitive antennae” gyrate like an overheated Geiger counter. It’s not paranoia this time, though, as Thorn stumbles into the middle of a crime spree prompted by a black-and-white photograph taken during the 1964 Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston heavyweight-championship fight in Miami. The bad guys want the photo, a gift from the photographer to Alex’s father, and are willing to do whatever needs doing to get it. Thorn starts out as he always does, merely trying to protect his loved ones, but eventually, inevitably, defense changes to offense: he knew the “feel of the tipping point–when his trot became a gallop, the gallop grew to a crazy, hurtling rush, and by God, once again he found himself sprinting over the suicidal edge.” Hall continues to explore the ever-intriguing psychodynamics of his unconventional hero, but he also adds a new dimension to the series with the fascinating look at Miami in the 1960s. Not since the superb stand-alone thriller Hard Aground (1993) has Hall delved so deeply into the fetid foundation on which contemporary South Florida was built. Another outstanding chapter in one of the genre’s most consistently first-rate series.
Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
In the last few years the original publisher of Magic City reverted the rights of the book back to me. So I’ve been taking the necessary steps to make the books available again, both as ebooks and as paperbacks. (Print on Demand)
It’s an expensive and time-consuming process but also a very satisfying one. Once the book is formatted and a new cover is created (by my amazing designer Lon Shapiro) it achieves a bit of immortality. As long as Amazon exists that book will be floating out on the cyber-shelf in the sky. Or wherever books float. Whether anyone buys it and reads it, well, that’s another story.
It’s kind of an out of body experience to interact with a book that I wrote a couple of decades ago. I wind up reading passages from it and almost always have a couple of competing sensations. For one, I inevitably feel that I used to write a hell of a lot better than I do now. I’ve lost the juice. The poetry has fled these old arthritic fingers.
Two, I also see how flawed that book was, or at least the prose that I manage to read. Yes, it’s full of lyrical energy, the young whippersnapper who composed those sentences was confident and limber fingered, but he was also very wordy. Today I would cut cut cut and delete some more and trim away fat until I’d carved half of the book away. I think that might be a product of my changing taste in reading.
I’m less patient with novels I read than I once was. I recently set aside two different best-selling thrillers I was reading because they had become tedious. Almost every action the main character took was described step-by-step in great detail. The movie equivalent to such writing is to film every step a character takes up a long stairway instead of showing a couple at the bottom and a couple at the top.
I’m afraid I might also put down some of my early books because I used to spend a little too much time on that stairway, not only describing the steps taken but the thoughts of the character at every step and the scent of the air and the heft of the light.
Lyrical yes. And I still value prose that is lush and fresh and challenging. But as I grow older I’ve become an advocate of “get on with it already.” So as I read some random pages of Magic City, I had those competing thoughts. But the overarching feeling I have is one of gratitude. That I was able to tell a story that I cared about deeply that made others feel deeply too and to be paid to do it, well, that’s an amazing bit of luck. There was hard work too, of course, and long hours at the keyboard instead of doing the thousand other things that normal people do to fill their lives.
I’m hoping that Magic City will find a new audience now. But fortunately the demographics of my readers is such that many of them (like me) have such spotty memories that they might buy and read Magic City a second time having totally forgotten that they’d read it before. Yay for that.
